and he told me that unless I wanted to get a much more significant number of bass traps that would heavily change the look of the room (and my marital status)You could use Helmholtz tubes and pipes to transform the acoustic decresasing the bass traps to only a minimum level.... But it is all up to your wife acepting a set of 3 groups of tubes in the living room... 😊
For sure the biggest asset in audio is not the gear at all it is using a room ONLY for audio...